The cost of a long distance telephone call is usually paid by the calling party rather than by the called party. Payment for the call is typically collected from the calling party by the carrier that originated the service, either directly or through the agency of the caller""s local telephone service provider. Consequently, when a call is placed from a first location served by an originating carrier to a second location served by a different terminating carrier, provision must be made to share with the terminating carrier some of the revenue collected by the originating carrier from the calling party.
For international telephone calls, this revenue sharing has traditionally been accomplished through the use of settlement agreements. Settlement agreements typically establish an accounting rate related to the cost of connecting the call between the countries, and specify how the accounting rate will be split between the two carriers. This split is typically 50-50.
For example, assume that a United States carrier and an overseas carrier negotiate a settlement agreement with a one dollar per minute accounting rate and a 50-50 revenue split. In accordance with the agreement, the U.S. carrier must pay 50 cents for every minute of connect time to called locations serviced by the overseas carrier. Conversely, the overseas carrier must pay 50 cents for every minute of connect time on calls terminated by the U.S. carrier.
As has been recognized, however, the negotiated accounting rate is frequently significantly higher than the actual cost of completing the international call. See, e.g., Frieden, Accounting Rates: The Business of International Telecommunications and the Incentive to Cheat, 43 Federal Communications Law Journal 111, 117, which is hereby incorporated by reference. For this reason, and because outbound calling volumes from the United States are significantly greater than inbound calling volumes from many foreign countries, U.S. carriers make large outbound payments to overseas carriers. In large measure, these charges are ultimately passed on to rate payers.
This payment imbalance is exacerbated when overseas carriers route inbound U.S. traffic under their control via private telephone lines into the United States. In this way, the overseas carriers are able to avoid paying high accounting rate settlements for calls to the United States from their countries, while receiving high accounting rate settlements from U.S. carriers who are forced to route outbound U.S. traffic through the overseas carrier because the overseas carrier is a monopolist in its home country. Moreover, overseas carriers often employ these alternative less-expensive routings for inbound U.S. traffic despite express contractual provisions in settlement agreements prohibiting such behavior.
To date, U.S. carriers have been forced to suffer such payment imbalances and have no immediate way to respond to breaches of contract by overseas carriers because of the significant time and expense required to reconfigure the global network to reroute calling traffic. The cumbersome reconfiguration process gives foreign carriers the opportunity to route inbound U.S. traffic via private lines, and otherwise run up settlement balances, without fear of retaliation from U.S. carriers.
More generally, this inflexible routing structure precludes telephone service providers from taking advantage of fluctuations in world-wide telephone rates. It would be desirable to provide a way for dynamic routing in response to rate changes so as to pass the savings on to the consumer. There is also a need to provide telephone companies with means to dynamically purchase and sell blocks of telephone connection bandwidth.
The need for flexible allocation of connection routes and for an ability to trade connection bandwidth accordingly exists not only in the international arena but in any internal market allowing competition in the field of communications.
The present invention provides a system and method for flexibly routing communications transmissions in an efficient manner. In a preferred embodiment, service providers submit information to a centralized server node which comprises cost and service parameter data for routing a communication from a first location to a second location. The server node receives all of the submitted rate information, evaluates it, and generates from the information a rate-table database comprising efficient routing paths for connecting transmissions between any two locations in a communications switching network. The server may be programmed to substantially optimize its rate-table database with respect to one or more parameters, such as price, network utilization, return traffic volumes, and others.
Service requesters submit service requests to the centralized server node. The server node identifies efficient routes which meet the requesters"" requirements and brokers sales of communication (or connect) time from the service providers to the service requesters. Connect time may be purchased on a transaction-by-transaction (e.g., call-by-call) basis or in larger blocks. Service requests may be submitted manually by a systems manager at the service reqester, or automatically by a telecommunications node associated with the service requester. The telecommunications node may be programmed to dynamically monitor current volume and sell or buy communication time or bandwidth on the basis of the actual and predicted requirements for connect time.
The server node administers all aspects of the network including authentication of carriers, risk management, financial transactions, settlement, and contract management, and tracking of the physical links connecting different portions of the network.
When a carrier wishes to establish communication (for example, a voice call) via a route purchased through the global network, it passes supervision to a local telecommunications node which establishes transmission via a routing path for which the carrier has purchased connect time. Alternatively, connect time to carry the communication may be purchased at the time of transmission.
When necessary, the system employs particular SS7 codes, C7 codes, C5 codes, IN codes, or other data messages (or combinations of the above based on the technological capability of various switches and gateways in the routing path) to inform a switch in the routing path that an incoming communication transaction is in transit to a different location, and is not for termination at the location of the switch. In this way, switches can distinguish terminating traffic from transit traffic and set rates for transit traffic without invoking settlement agreement accounting rates.
In a preferred embodiment the system is capable of displaying market-price information related to the supported communication routes to prospective sellers and buyers of connection time. This display is preferably in the form of a streaming banner generated by a Java applet running on the customer""s PC.
While the preferred embodiments are described in terms of a calling telephone and a called telephone, it will be understood that the invention may be practiced using all manner of telephone user equipment. By way of example, but not limitation, this telephone user equipment may include answering machines, fax machines, video conferencing equipment, local switches (such as in hotels or offices), voice synthesis/recognition equipment, dialers, answering services, and computers.
Moreover, while some of the preferred embodiments are primarily described in terms of a voice telephone call from a calling telephone to a called telephone, it will be understood that the global network of the present invention may embrace all classes of connectivity, including by way of example, but without limitation, data transmissions, voice over IP, ATM, FR, and virtual net. Furthermore, transmissions may be routed via paths composed of calling-legs which employ different transmission technologies.